People are killing each other all over Chicago. In the streets in front of their homes. At drunken parties. They are hiding in victims' cars and popping out of trash cans and shooting people as they come home for the day.

An escalation in gang warfare? No. A game being played by members of Chicago's theatre community.

The game, called Assassins, has been going on now for three months. As of this writing, three people are still actively playing. In game parlance, they are "alive," having avoided being squirted or super-soaked by the other 77 game players who made up the eight teams who started hunting each other in March. By the time you read this, there will be a winner, after a Tuesday night kill-off between the remaining three players.

This is not paintball, which is played in a specific setting with specific protective gear for a specific length of time. This is pseudo urban warfare, with rules. There are designated "safe zones," but people can be killed in their homes, near their offices, on the el. Just about anywhere at anytime.

One of the final players happens to work for me. Two of my other employees "died" earlier in the game. And I have had a first-hand look at the paranoia and thrill this game elicits. They listen to each others' personal telephone conversations, in hopes of finding info on the their prey. They laugh and talk a little too long about last night's mile-plus chase or the woman who got shot in front of her parents, who were horrified that their daughter was really being stalked.

To listen to them, you get a sense of how much fun they're having. One player made it a rule never to walk out of a building dressed the same way he went in. That included donning his girlfriend's skirt and pumps. He says his stalkers were looking for HIM, not a cross dresser.

Another game player was shot through the quarter inch opening of his car window. He was 70 feet from his office—20 feet farther than the designated "safe zone." Officials were called in. Rulings were made.

Then there was the trash can. A Chicago actor hid out in a full garbage can for 45 minutes, waiting for his prey to arrive and hoping that her father and brother, who were prowling the home compound with baseball bats, wouldn't think to open the stinky trash bin. They didn't.

It is all great fun, but hardly an invention of those wiley Chicago actors. Variations on the assassins game have been played at high schools and colleges for about a decade now. And, no doubt due to Survivor and it's knock-offs, the popularity of such games seems, anecdotally, to be increasing.

But is it really all good fun? While a bunch of actors are acquiring sense memory for the feeling of being stalked or the thrill of the kill, other people not privileged enough to have gone to college and become artists are in Iraq experiencing the real thing. I don't think they feel that it's thrilling. And, while I'm sure they laugh in the way that comrades in stressful situations must laugh to let off steam, I don't think they would say they're having fun.

So what accounts for the popularity of such assassination games?

My girlfriend, who grew up poor, has a theory that, in general, poor people don't become artists. They don't have the time, for one. And if they have the ambition, as she did, to get the hell up and out, they're certainly not going to spend all their time on a profession guaranteed to not make them much money.

There are certainly exceptions. Art that comes from the poor and disenfranchised is often gripping and relevant, as attested to by the popularity of hip-hop. Artists who live in societies in which free thought and ideas are considered dangerous have found ingenious ways to make meaningful theatre that speaks to the hopes and dreams of the people. But in general, art—and certainly theatre—in this country doesn't have that same urgency. And when it does, few people come to see it. As a result, theatre artists in the U.S. are mostly college educated, middle class kids who don't feel that the alternative to venting their lives in artistic expression is to go to jail. They have day jobs. And they don't, as a rule, join the armed forces.

Maybe that's a bad thing. Maybe these kinds of urban warfare games are a secret cry for the reinstitution of the draft, a kind of need for people to feel like their lives are meaningful, that they are risking something for the good of the nation.

I seriously doubt that; but it has occurred to me that if there was a draft—that if middle-class, educated people in their 20's were at real risk of being forced to join the armed forces and put their lives in danger—these urban warfare games wouldn't be so popular.

One of the game players who recently was killed thinks that's bunk. We all grew up playing cops and robbers, she says. We came of age when terrorism had little meaning in our lives. This game is just an adult extension of our childhoods, when we would stay out till dark jumping out from behind bushes with toy guns.

A friend of mine who runs a theatre thinks that the chaos in the world right now is exactly what's fueling these games. People feel they have no control over war and terrorism. Other people make the decisions to fight and send others to do the fighting for them and the rest of us don't feel we can do much but buy a bumper sticker or start a web log. Playing these games gives us a feeling of pseudo-solidarity with victims and soldiers.

I'm not sure about that, either.

I have talked to and read the work of sociologists who despair that the U.S. is going to hell. We are soft. Bankruptcy—the desire to be forgiven the debts for things we bought that we really didn't need—is one of the biggest dramas in American life. Bankruptcy. It's not life or death. It's the safety net for a fully functioning, extremely wealthy society that has grown complacent. I doubt many Iraqis or Sudanese or Palestinians are thinking about filing for bankruptcy. Most of them are just trying to find a way to feed their families without getting killed in the process.

These are just theories. I really have no idea why people would want to play games in which they become at turns paranoid and aggressive; and always obsessed. And I can't quite simply say Americans are soft and leave it at that. In a free country, the oppressions are much more subtle; but I would argue, just as important for artists to fight against. My only hope is that the fervency with which these actors are living this game shows up next season in Chicago's theatres.